The Encoded Gaze

James Baldwin's method was to read an artifact as a confession of the worldview that produced it—the film, the law, the social arrangement as a record of who its makers assumed they were serving. The encoded gaze applies this method to machine-learning systems: a training dataset is not a neutral sample of the world but a record of what a civilization chose to document, and the model that learns from it inherits the selection's perspective. The most documented evidence comes from computer vision: face-recognition systems trained on datasets dominated by lighter-skinned faces have been shown to perform systematically worse on darker-skinned faces, and worst of all on darker-skinned women—not because of malicious intent but because the data encoded who counted as the default human in the minds of its makers. The harm is double and non-symmetrical: a system that cannot see you fails you, and a system embedded in surveillance and policing that sees